Hi, I’m Astra

Welcome to my Voice Dialogue website – a resource to help you with your personal growth and relationships using the ideas and techniques from Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves.

Would you like to know why you think, behave and feel the way you do? 

Would you like to change any behaviour and thought patterns that no longer serve you? While also accepting and loving who you are now?

The key is awareness of how the various parts of your psyche – your inner selves – operate.

Read the information here, download my free ebook, and try the exercises to help you begin to experience the benefits of this powerful personal growth work.

What is Voice Dialogue?

Voice Dialogue is a unique personal growth method created by American husband and wife psychologists Dr Hal Stone and Dr Sidra Stone.

It includes the Psychology of Selves, which is the idea that we have many selves, also known as inner selves, parts and energy patterns, and include archetypes.

You’re probably familiar with some selves already: the Inner Critic, Inner Child, the Pusher, Perfectionist, the Rational Mind, the Pleaser, the Spiritual Self, the Inner Patriarch, the Inner Goddess.

There are selves you identify with and there are others you’ve learnt to hide or completely bury.

The Voice Dialogue technique enables you to connect with, embody and dialogue with your various selves.

This dialoguing process – which is non-judgmental of any self – develops your understanding and awareness of how and why your selves are influencing your feelings, thoughts and behaviours.

It enables you to shift from being over-identified with your dominant self/selves and embrace more of your other inner selves. This leads to greater inner balance, harmony and freedom. 

The results: old habits and patterns shift more easily, stubborn blocks dissolve, and your relationships transform.

Read more about the benefits of Voice Dialogue or continue below for a brief explanation of how your personality is made up of both primary and disowned selves.

Which Selves do You Recognise in You?

You know how the petals of a rose are hidden before it blooms? With only a few visible on the outside? You also have only a few selves visible on the surface, with many more hidden underneath, all essentially protecting your core.

The Outgoing Self

That part of yourself you feel is you, that holds your rules, values and much of your personal history, is your primary self. This primary self developed in your childhood to protect you and enable your survival. It is who you have come to identify as. (You might call it your ego or your personality.)

This primary self does an amazing job (you’re alive!) but it is limited by its nature. By its perceptions, abilities, energy type, rules and values. And so therefore you’re limited by its nature.

The Lazy Self

For instance, you might have developed a highly Responsible primary self, because that’s what worked for you in your family system. Maybe one or both of your parents were irresponsible. Or you were expected to be responsible and any opposite behaviour was frowned upon or even punished. So now as an adult you are probably someone who others depend on. But you probably also find it difficult to let go, to be spontaneous and to have fun.

Or if you developed a strong Rational Mind as a primary self, then you may find it challenging to express and understand feelings (your own and other people’s), or to feel at all.

Or if you became a Pleaser, then you probably find it impossible to feel entitled to take for yourself and have your own needs met.

The Perfectionist

Some selves you accept and include in the package that’s ‘you’, while others are relegated to your shadow where you judge them or have little or no awareness of them. Those are your disowned selves.

Usually different selves emerge at different times.

So your Achiever or Perfectionist may be who you are at work. But your Nurturing Parent may be who emerges with your children.

In your relationship you may sometimes be your Playful Self or Sensual Self, but at other times your Critical Father/Mother or Needy Child Self takes over.

It could be that you are always operating from one self or a group of selves that work together, such as the Responsible Self or the Pleaser, and you struggle to ever express other parts of yourself.

How your selves are ‘configured’ in you will determine the choices you make and how you behave and feel. 

Each part of you holds particular memories and has a narrative about your life, from its experience of it. Each self has preferences for how you live your life and goals it would like you to achieve. Each self also has anxieties and concerns. 

So when you’re setting goals, imagining a future, healing the past, your results will depend on who in you is involved.

That has massive implications for how your life and relationships play out.

If you’d like to become more conscious in how you experience your life, then becoming aware of and integrating your selves is key. 

The Spiritual Self

Start my downloading my FREE ebook Which Inner Self is Running Your Life? for an example of how Voice Dialogue will help you in an everyday situation.

It also gives you an overview of 20 selves, and a simple exercise to discover your own primary and disowned selves.